Tag: DJing with CDs

Many people who are aspiring DJs are making the difficult decision of whether to use vinyl records on a turntable or to DJ with CDs on a CDJ-type CD players. Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses. Most good clubs that you might DJ at have the ability to play both CDs and vinyl and you can bring whichever you prefer.

Playing vinyl is considered the most authentic approach to DJing. The art of DJing was born on turntables and most old school DJs would never consider doing anything else. The downsides are the turntables are delicate and expensive mechanical objects. Records themselves are also rather fragile and expensive to buy.

DJing with CDs is probably the most common approach these days. They are most commonly played with CDJ decks made by Pioneer or similar products sold by competing companies. These are special CD players that are designed to emulate the ability of a turntable to adjust the speed of a track and to move within a track as easily as possible in order to queue up your songs and match the beat of two overlapping songs.

One of the main benefits of playing off of CDs is the ability to download music from the Internet. This gives you easy access to a much broader selection of music than you would be able to easily get on vinyl, even if you live in a large city with a lot of record stores. Most CD DJs burn their own CDs with all of their favorite tracks. If a CD gets scratched, broken or lost, they can simply burn a new copy very quickly and cheaply.